How Seattle Academy Uses SchoolCal | SchoolCal

The school: Seattle Academy

Seattle Academy is an independent school in Seattle for grades 6–12 that prepares students to 'Question, Imagine, and Create so they can Contribute Boldly to a Changing World.'

Guided by its core principles: College and Life, Inclusive Community, Culture of Performance, and Know the Kid, they offer a bold, student-centered education that teaches young people how to think, not what to think, empowering them to thrive with curiosity, creativity, and confidence.

The challenge: lack of visibility & school-wide friction

With a rotating schedule spanning grades 6-12 and a distributed campus spread across six or seven blocks, simply getting students to the right place at the right time was full of friction.

So Willy Felton, Director of Technology at Seattle Academy, set out to find a solution. "The main problem we were trying to solve for, was we wanted students to know where they were supposed to be," Willy explains. If a student went to the wrong building, it meant a long walk back to where they should have been, creating frustration and lost time.

But the pain points extended far beyond lost students. Parents couldn't easily see what classes their children had the next day. Student schedules were buried as PDFs in portals that required login access, forcing families to print them out or take phone photos. Teachers couldn't quickly find where colleagues were to schedule meetings, leading to endless back-and-forth emails. Faculty who manually entered their schedules into Google Calendar faced tedious, error-prone work.

The result? Friction everywhere, for students, parents, and teachers.

Discovering SchoolCal

Willy discovered SchoolCal through a Veracross Google group where technology directors and education specialists were discussing solutions. Intrigued by what he heard, he reached out to learn more.

Implemenation: from setup to celebration in days

The implementation process proved remarkably simple. After meeting with the SchoolCal team and running tests on his own account, Willy decided to turn it on for faculty without formal announcement or training.

The response was immediate celebration.

"It caused an immediate uproar in the best sense of the word," Willy recalls. When he rolled it out to students, the same thing happened: 100% celebration. No training needed. It just worked.

Willy says the payoff was instant and obvious. Teachers could finally see where colleagues were teaching without the endless "Do you teach block two? What about Friday?" exchanges. Faculty could look months ahead and know their schedule. Students gained clarity about their daily rotations. And parents could finally see their children's schedules in real-time.

Additional benefits

Rolling out SchoolCal solved Seattle Academy's original problem, but it also delivered unexpected benefits:

For Students: Full schedule visibility with automatic class rosters (which students loved). Accountability for mandatory events like grade-level and all-school meetings that now appear directly on their calendars. And the ability to promote non-mandatory events, natively in students’ schedules.

For Teachers: Effortless schedule coordination. The ability to see months ahead. Automatic synchronization with no manual calendar entry required.

For Parents: Willy, himself a parent of a student, calls the experience "marvelous." He can see his son's schedule when making appointments and knows which days might allow early dismissal.

For Administration: A centralized, single source of truth. SchoolCal lets schedules stay in the system of record where they belong (in this case, Veracross) and feed automatically to Google Calendar without duplication or errors. The system requires minimal maintenance: essentially set it and forget it, with just one annual adjustment each summer.

SchoolCal has also enabled Seattle Academy to push out athletic events, room reservations, and community meetings directly to student calendars, ensuring important events don't get lost in the noise.

Willy’s Advice to Others

"Calendars are a hard thing at schools. Schedules are a hard thing and they're so central to what we do. Where do people need to be at what time? Solving for that problem is really worthwhile."

As a technology professional, Willy appreciates that SchoolCal is "a product that just works." It's accurate, stable, and reliable, with almost no issues in years of use. Every technology director has experienced solutions that create new problems while solving old ones. SchoolCal is not that.

Most importantly, it eliminates duplicate information entry, keeping the student information system as the single source of truth while seamlessly distributing that information where people need it.